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Ursula K. Le Guin’s Blog

2014

81. The Tango

Annals of Pard IX

Cats are pure predators: they hunt live prey. Carrion and
other stuff dogs like is of no interest to them. They abhor sweets, and despise
most vegetables, though many make an exception for asparagus, or corn, and my
big Leonard liked a taste of salad greens and had a passion for raw spinach. We’re
told that feral cats get the greens they need from what the prey they eat ate.

Pard is about as unferal as a cat can be. He stays indoors
by choice and can’t be persuaded to vary his austere, self-chosen diet of dry
kibbles and tap water. But we live in an old house with a lot of holes in it. The
outdoors gets in. Live prey occurs fairly often. . . And he’s a very
good predator, at least up to a point. He’ll spend whole days or nights in the
attic, listening, expecting. He knocks over the trash basket under the kitchen
sink every morning to examine it for live content. He knows where the mice were
and will be. He knows where the mouse is, and waits for it. And he gets it.

It’s at this point that his predatory purity gets muddled
and his skill as a hunter ends. As well as I can figure it out, his Food
Perception Zone is so extremely limited that the mouse doesn’t enter into it at
all. To him the mouse is a toy, a really good toy — the best imaginable — a toy
that will play with him. Oh joy! And
he brings it to me.

At this point most people say instructively, “He’s teaching
you to hunt.” The idea is that mama cats bring live mice to their kittens and
release them in order to teach the kittens hunting skills. This may well be so,
but I have trouble extrapolating it to a young neutered male. Pard knows the
difference between a woman and a kitten. And anyhow I don’t think he wants to
teach me hunting skills. I bring him toys and play with some of them with him.
He connects toy-playing with me, so he brings his grand new toy to me to play
with.

His first couple of catches were dispatched pretty quickly,
I think by accident, through clumsiness. He hadn’t yet learned how not to
damage the toy. Alas, he has perfected this skill.

The worst time was a month or so ago when he brought a
rather large, extremely vigorous mouse to my room at about two a.m. and
released it on my bed. I woke up in time to fling it wildly off in a
spontaneous convulsion, which sent it running about on the floor again so Pard
could chase it again. Clearly I was behaving just as I should, keeping the toy
in motion — so when he found it he brought it right back onto the bed. This
time I was wide awake, and made noise and light as well as wild physical
upheavals. Pard was delighted.

The mouse remained in good running order for a long time. There
was no way I could catch it, but there were dozens of ways Pard could, and did —
and then let it go again. It went on and on. It was awful. Even when they both
got out into the hall, I couldn’t shut them out of the room, because the room
door is about half an inch off the floor and the mouse would have got into the
room leaving the cat outside hurling himself against the door. I fled to another
room with a mouseproof door and shut it and hid.

That may have impaired Pard’s motivation, because the mouse
got away, and he didn’t catch it for two days, though he was on the hunt most
of the time. I lay each night in dread of the midnight mouse.

He caught it, and another since then, both in the trash can
under the sink (which has steep sides a mouse can’t climb, so it’s like
shooting fish in a barrel). He brings his mouse to my room in the dead of night,
carrying it carefully, as a mother cat carries a kitten, and with the same
alert, head-up, trotting gait. He puts it gently down on the floor — he hasn’t
put one in bed with me again, for which I am grateful. The chase then circles
round under furniture, into the doorless closet, behind the drum, through the
vacuum-cleaner-parts boxes, etc. Rattle rattle, pause — BANG! — long tense
pause — skitter, skitter, rustle, thump — long, long pause . . .
Rattle . . . rattle. . . Then at last, blessedly,
silence. The final silence. Exhaustion or an over-hasty pounce has released the
mouse at last.

Pard carries it up and leaves it on the floor of Charles’s
study in the attic. That done, he has absolutely no further interest in it. Why
Charles gets the body, only Pard knows. We’d like to see it as a thoughtful
attention, but it seems rather more like the child who generously gives his
friend the toy he broke — “Here! This is a present! For you!”

Knowing that there is no way he can learn Compassion any
more than he can learn Cruelty, the skill I wish I could teach Pard is Quick
Murder. But whatever it is — the predatory instinct inseparably interacting
with the play instinct, I suppose — all he wants of a mouse is for it to go on.
And the mouse resourcefully, silently, gallantly dances out its role in the
fatal tango.

82. Belief in Belief

83. Cats, Claws, Panic

Annals of Pard X

Do cats bite their nails? I mean, do cats other than Pard bite
their nails?

After breakfast, Pard washes his face. Sometimes the soft
swipe across the jowl with the spit-dampened front paw turns into something
else: he holds that paw pad-first to to his mouth, gets a claw between his
teeth, and tugs it. He tugs repeatedly, and hard enough to make a not wholly
agreeable tooth-on-claw noise.

In the afternoon, when he is doing All-over Spitbath and Yoga
Grooming, he lies comfortably on the lower end of his backbone, seizes one hind
leg with one front paw, gets a hind claw between his teeth, and tugs it at the
same way. He must be using his felines (surely they aren’t called canines in a
cat?) because his other teeth don’t look capable of a grip like that.

I never had a cat before that did this. Sometimes I think
he’s cleaning his claws, as we clean our fingernails. Sometimes I think he’s
getting off the little shells that claws discard as they grow out. Sometimes I
wonder if he’s so bored he bites his nails.

Does anybody know?

Do cats have panic attacks?

One night last month Pard stayed up in the uninhabited part
of the attic all night long. In the morning he didn’t come and walk around on
me and purr till I got up. He didn’t come and walk all over everything in the
bathroom purring with his tail in the air while I got dressed. He didn’t gallop
down the stairs ahead of me and stand around purring extremely loudly with the
tip of his tail between his ears while I put his kibbles in his bowl.

He didn’t come down at all till I called him with his food
call, prrrt-ticky-ticky! and rattled the kibble-can. And I had to come clear
upstairs with it. Then he ventured down the attic stairs — stair by stair, paw
by paw — eyes like searchlights, ears back, mouth tense, tail low: textbook
illustration of Very Anxious Cat. It took him forever to get all the way down
to the kitchen, and then he was too anxious to eat — the first time ever that
he didn’t clean his bowl industriously and immediately. He’d nibble, and then
freak out again and crouch, or run back upstairs. He never did finish that
breakfast.

He was that way all day. He wanted to be with me, but was not
sociable and couldn’t relax. He led me once up to the attic, and we walked all
around in it. I wondered if maybe something like a raccoon or big rat had got in
there and given him a scare. But there was no sign of that, and no particular
place that spooked him, there or elsewhere. He was just totally, globally
spooked. It was very spooky.

It really is not the kind of attic that has ghosts.

I did think of Strange Animal Behavior Before Earthquakes
that I used to read about in newspaper supplements in 1938.

The only thing besides earthquakes I could think of that
seemed a possible cause for such a panic was my overnight bag, which I’d set
out the day before. He’d sniffed it then, with no alarm whatever, and got into
it, because it is his privilege and duty to enter all enterable spaces and
explore them. He has explored that bag twenty times. He got out again, and
thereafter ignored the bag. I wasn’t going to travel till the next day, and
anyhow wasn’t in the state I’m sometimes in before a trip; though he’s definitely
sensitive to stress and high tension, I don’t think he was picking up my travel
nerves. Anyhow, his way of acting out my tensions is to do The Forbidden Things
— leap up to the mantelpiece, attack the embroidery on the Morris chair,
disintegrate the sofa leg, etc. — and then go hide in plain sight in my
armchair, exactly like a wicked three-year-old.

He remained unhappy all day, licking his lips often, tail
held low, unable to settle down and sleep — barely distracted from his anxiety
for a moment by crunchy Greenies, usually the delight of life.

I wasn’t happy about leaving him, wondering if some physical
ailment was making him act this way, though he didn’t move or act as if in
pain. He hid out somewhere again all night, but he did come in and walk around
on me at six-thirty. He was still tail-down and purrless, but behaving more
normally. So I went on my trip.

When I called home, Charles
reported that Pard was doing better. Next day when I got home he was pretty
well back to normal and the day after that he was fine.

He’s not what I’d call a spooky cat. He’s shy with people,
mostly because he sees so few. Sudden noises can scare him (though sometimes he
obviously just wants an excuse to race upstairs with a lot of hysterical
scrabbling and a huge black bottlebrush tail. After which he saunters back
down. Noise? What noise?) And he still generally prefers looking out the window
to going out the door. When he does go out onto our second-story verandah, he’d
rather one of us was with him; he’s tense and cautious, tail down, the whole
time he’s out. Often he doesn’t even go all the way down the stairs to the
garden. But mostly, usually, basically, he is a cheerful little body, tail
high, purring me awake in the morning, devouring his breakfast and dinner,
racing joyously after Greenies, in full control of his household and its
routine.

What was that awful night and day of fear? Do cats have panic
attacks out of the blue? Does anybody know?

If you know about Nail Biting Cats or Cat Panics, you can
tell me by clicking on the Book View Café link to this blog. I will read all
reports with interest and gratitude. (You might want to take a look at BVC’s
bookstore while you’re there, they publish good stuff.)

85. Pard and the Time Machine

Annals of Pard XI

86. The Internet as Heaven

Time and space are the basic parameters of being in the
world. Plants and animals fill their time and their space without question: the
tree or the cow occupies its place in the world and its life-span completely
and comfortably, seeking only to continue in them. Human beings as babies and
children do much the same.

But the developing human brain
loses or abandons this seamless occupancy of the world. People begin to
question the size and shape of the space they occupy and the length of time
they occupy it. They become restless and uncomfortable, they feel incomplete.
Dissatisfied with the parameters of their being, they seek to change or escape
them. This dissatisfaction has been called divine discontent. In Buddhism
recognition of it is dukkha, the First Noble Truth.

Travel was for a long time one way
to augment our limited experience of space. Unfortunately it augmented the
experience of time only through discomfort. (Are we there yet?) But high-speed
travel, eagerly pursued as a goal for the last couple of centuries and made
more comfortable, shrinks time-between-places. At 50 miles an hour or so,
motion begins to erase the experience of space, to diminish the awareness of
traversal. Awareness of location begins to be limited to the vehicle, with
little perception of the world outside it. At supersonic speeds the body has no
experience at all of the distance traversed, only of the relatively brief time
spent traversing it. At the speed of light the body would probably have no experience
at all of either space or time.

However, since travel as we know it
involves actually transporting the body, it provides no real escape from space
and time. The body, however fast and far it goes, has to end up somewhere sometime.

Human beings discovered long ago
that escape from limitations of time and space is possible through altering
perception — by imagination, dream, stargazing, getting drunk, getting high,
intellectual concentration, contemplation, art, mystical practice. Again, the
escapade doesn’t last, since when it ends you’re right back in your own body,
but it is a well-tested and popular tactic.

Symbolic language provides one of
these means of altering perception. Writing and reading can occupy the mind
with a symbolic experience completely excluding local awareness. Of course,
eventually the book ends and you’re back where you started from. Although “you”
may not be entirely the same person that started out to read the book.

The absorption of consciousness by
symbol is heightened tremendously on the Internet. Virtual communication (all
of which involves and much of which consists of reading or writing) is a mental
or symbolic act that involves the body only in mental attention and some
minimal physical motions. By almost disembodying consciousness, it erases
awareness of location and lapse of time. On the Internet, corporeal
consciousness is replaced with a tremendously versatile, almost purely mental
existence consisting of immediate symbolic communication with other people,
individually or in great although not clearly realized numbers, and access to
symbolic reproductions of reality in the form of information, literature,
images, music, games, catalogues of consumer items, etc. This wealth of
symbolic reproduction is so extendable and can lead to so many connected and
related reproductions that people can wander in it endlessly. Absorbed in
virtual communication on the Internet, they successfully escape from
consciousness of actuality, including mortality. Symbolic communications, active
and passive, fill awareness to the point that the communicator is not aware of
time, space, and the body that exists in such a limited region of them.

The Internet’s supply of channels
of communication and of symbolic reproductions is already inexhaustible and
still increasing.

To be free of the body, tied to no
place in time and no time in place, yet having effortless, limitless access to
everyone one knows, to all knowledge, and to immediate or securely promised
satisfaction of desires would appear to be the condition of a blessed
immortality.

87. The Myth of the Veneer

“The secret world of the Mafia is a concave mirror that
reflects and magnifies our world. If looked at properly, it can illuminate
aspects of society that are normally out of focus and taken for granted. When
we peel away the veneer of law and moral convention, we enter a world where
social relations are in their raw state, the use of violence is pervasive,
information uncertain and betrayal a common currency, and where the natural
bonds of family love are defiled. By looking at the Mafia microcosm, we can
understand better who we are.”

This paragraph, from the Times
Literary Supplement of September 18, 2009, opened a review by Federico Varese
of The First Family, by Mike Dash, a
book about the Mafia. I found it such an exemplary mishmash of half-baked
statements and half-thought-out notions that I kept it around until I could
take it on, mixed metaphor by mixed metaphor, cliché by cliché. I think it was
worth doing, because the basic fallacy it expresses is repeated so tirelessly
and accepted so widely as the tough-minded, ugly truth. I’m calling it after
its favorite metaphor: The Myth of the Veneer.

So, to begin with: What aspects of society are normally out of focus? What aspects of society
are normally in focus? When, to whom? Whose eyes are supposed to be looking,
focused or unfocused?

How does peeling away a veneer allow us to enter a world?

If you peel away a veneer, you reveal a solid substance of a different
nature from the veneer. If law and moral
convention are a veneer, the
implication is that they are a thin, artificial disguise or prettification of
something substantial but less pretty.

What is this substance?

Are we to assume the substance
revealed is that of social relations in
their raw state?

Does a raw state postulate some “natural” or prehistoric phase of human
existence, a pre-social state in which there was no social code, and each
individual invented behavior and relationship from scratch?

Social animals such as man all live
within a system of rules of behavior and relationship, some innate and some
learned, which limit violence within the group, facilitate communication, and
make repeated betrayal of trust unprofitable. Almost all human beings, even
infants, are continuously engaged in intensely complex mutual human
relationships taking place within a society and culture consisting of rules,
laws, traditions, institutions, etc. that specify and regulate the nature and
manner of those relationships.

There is no evidence that human
beings ever lived in asocial anarchy, and much evidence that, like other social
animals, they have always lived within a social system. The rules differ
greatly, but there are never no rules.

In other words, law and moral convention — social
control of behavior and relationship — is not an artificial, enforced
constraint, but a substantial element of our existence as members of our species. Non-violent,
informative, trustworthy behavior is fully as natural to us as violence, lying,
and betrayal.

This confusion about what “natural”
means is exposed in the surprising statement that the natural bonds of family are defiled
in the world revealed by the Mafia-mirror — a world previously posited as the
“raw,” natural one that was concealed by “unnatural” social hypocrisy.

Why would we understand better who we are by looking in the Mafia-mirror? Its
selective reflection and magnification
appear to “illuminate” only degradation of the substantial and defilement of
the natural. We certainly will come to understand better who the Mafiosi are by
studying their world. But wouldn’t we better understand who we are by looking at the place of such
an institution as the Mafia within
the rich, complex world of (more or less) functional human relationships, law,
and moral convention in which most of us who read books and blogs are fortunate
enough to live?

But Mr Varese, dismissing all that
as mere veneer, privileges criminality as reality.

Rip off the disguise and we are all
revealed — traitorous, savage, ruthless brutes. It’s a fantasy cherished by
many. Particularly, perhaps, by quite honest, decent, literary men.

The publisher is Vaskikirjat. I’d like to credit the
translator and the cover artist, but since Finnish is a language of which I
don’t know and can’t even guess at a single word, I don’t know who is which: (Käännös)
Jyrki Iivonen, (Kansi) Jani Laatikainen, or (Taitto) Erkka Leppänen. In any
case, my thanks to all.

Now I wish I knew if you, Reader, were as surprised as I was
to find this is the cover of a book printed in Finland. And if you, like me,
are a little horrified by your own surprise — but not surprised at it.

Finland is a nation of about 5 million people. As well as I
can figure from the statistics, about 99% of this population is white.

The US is a nation of about 316 million people, of whom
around 77% are or consider themselves white.

I believe everybody in Four
Ways to Forgiveness is some shade of brown except for those described as
black, and the slave population of Yeowe, contemptuously called “dusties,” who
are a sort of pale greige. In most of my books, a minority of the characters,
or none, are specified as white, while major characters or whole populations
are described as dark-skinned.

With very rare exceptions, the cover art of my books in both
America and England has utterly ignored specific descriptions in the text and
portrayed the characters as white. Often strikingly white — pallid North
European types — Finnish, maybe . . .

Many readers believe that writers get to choose the covers
of their books. In traditional publishing, it’s a lucky author who even gets a
look at the cover before the book comes out. Some of us who have gained a
little clout get a clause in the contract that gives us cover approval, but our
approval is ”not to be unreasonably withheld.”

Guess who gets to define “unreasonable”?

I’ve fought the blonde bimbos and the hairy-chested,
blue-eyed Aryan heroes tooth and nail for forty years. Over and over I have
been utterly defeated. Publisher’s cover departments are patronizing and
impenetrable. We know what sells, they say. Covers with people of color on them
don’t sell.

Cover departments are always absolutely certain that they
know what sells. Blind certainty is a hard thing to overcome, particularly when
it’s silently supported by a comfortably unquestioning acceptance of racial
prejudice.

And so in a way it’s self-fulfilling, for if no one in
America ever sees a book with a person of color on the cover, a book with a
person of color on it may look quite strange, unfriendly, to something like 77%
of possible American readers . . . Oh it’s something about Them, it isn’t about Us, I only want to read
about Us.

Dear Finnish publisher and artist, I praise your spirit and
thank you for giving my book this joyous and appropriate presentation.

May the publishers presenting my books in my own country
look at it and take thought, and take courage from it too. It’s true, what this
painting shows: if we bring the good spirit to the dance, we can dance
together. There might even be a Forgiveness Day.